Religion and Meaning

Martin Klüners / Jörn Rüsen Religion und Sinn Martin Klüners / Jörn Rüsen Religion and meaning Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Bibliographic Information of the German National Library: The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at https://dnb.de. © 2020, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen All rights reserved. The work and its parts are protected by copyright. Any utilisation in cases other than those permitted by law requires the prior written consent of the publisher. Cover illustration: Hieronymus Bosch, Assumption of the Blessed into Heaven (detail), between 1505-1515 Typesetting: SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Printing and binding: e Hubert & Co. BuchPartner, Göttingen Printed in the EU Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Publishers | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-525-45326-1 Content To the cover .................................................................................... 9 Martin Klüners Soul, Reason, Faith - The Psychological Foundations of religion ..................................................................................... 11 Quaestiones .................................................................................... 11 A little history of the soul ............................................................. 15 The soul in early religions ...................................................... 15 The Soul in Western Philosophy .......................................... 16 Approaches to overcoming the opposition Between explaining and understanding ............................... 19 The soul sciences ..................................................................... 20 Psychoanalysis as a natural science inspired hermeneutics ............................................................ 21 The relationship between body and soul in understanding of psychoanalysis ..................................................................... 21 "Reason": The Sense of Tracking ................................................. 24 The trackers of the San ........................................................... 24 The interest in historical truth .............................................. 25 Limits of historical science as a science of consciousness .. 28 The Reality Principle............................................................... 32 "Sense"....................................................................................... 35 "Faith": From the visible to the invisible Things ............................................................................................. 36 The other reality ...................................................................... 36 Dreamtime and Dream .......................................................... 38 5 The Irrational: Myth and the Unconscious ......................... 39 Developmental psychology or psychoanalysis?................... 41 Trance and Transcendence .................................................... 46 The feeling of guilt as the most important problem of cultural development .......................................................... 50 Conclusio ........................................................................................ 56 Jörn Rüsen The red threads in the fabric of history - Historical Meaning between Immanence and Transcendence 65 What is sense? ................................................................................ 67 Dimensions of meaning: Space, Time, Self................................ 71 Room ......................................................................................... 71 Time .......................................................................................... 72 Self ............................................................................................. 73 Religion ........................................................................................... 75 Immanence and transcendence ................................................... 77 History ............................................................................................ 81 Dimensions of the Historical ....................................................... 85 The cognitive dimension ........................................................ 86 The aesthetic dimension......................................................... 89 The political dimension .......................................................... 91 The religious dimension ......................................................... 92 The psychological dimension ................................................ 93 The moral dimension ............................................................. 96 The didactic dimension .......................................................... 98 Difference and synthesis of the dimensions ........................ 98 The Constructed Construction of Historical Meaning 99 Four types of historical sense-making ...................................... 104 Philosophy of History - Difference and Unity of content, form and function ................................................... 106 Transcendence and immanence - historical sense and religious salvation................................................................. 110 Outlook: Challenges for a sustainable historical thinking .... 115 Martin Klüners Comment on Jörn Rüsen's contribution "The red threads in the fabric of history". ............................. 123 6 Jörn Rüsen Comment on Martin Klüners' contribution "Soul, Reason, Faith - The Psychological Foundations of Religion ........................................................... 128 Letter from Martin Klüners to Jörn Rüsen ........................... 131 7 To Cover picture The cover picture shows a detail from the painting, which was probably created between 1505 and 1515, and which can be traced back to the 17th century at the latest (possibly as early as 1520). (possibly as early as 1520) in Venice and now exhibited in the Palazzo Grimani there, which, as part of the four so-called afterlife panels, refers to the fate of souls after death - but possibly also after the Last Judgement, which, according to recent art historical interpretation, may have been the theme of the now lost reliquary or sacrament house to which the panels once belonged (Ilsink et al., 2016, S. 308-316). It was chosen for the present volume because it is able to illustrate in an excellent way concepts such as "soul", "transcendence", etc., which are generally rather difficult to materialise, but which are relevant in the context of the contributions published here. Like all great works of art, it also opens up the possibility of very diverse interpretations. One of them draws the viewer's attention to the parallels between the depicted transition to the afterlife and the process of birth: the tunnel of light appears as the great birth canal, the dark part of the picture, on the other hand, as the intrauterine world, which the souls, like foetuses floating in amniotic fluid, leave in the direction of the light. Death thus corresponds to the birth experience, but this world and the hereafter are interchanged if one also understands the prenatal world as an "otherworldly" world (Frenken, 2016, p. 243 f.). This interpretation is somewhat reminiscent of the belief of some tribes that the souls return to those worlds after death. 9 They become the children of the spirit that they were before birth waiting patiently in the beyond to be born again (cf. my contribution in this volume, p. 15). Martin Klüners Literature Frenken, R. (2016). Symbol Placenta. Prenatal psychology of art. Wiesbaden: Springer. Ilsink, M., Koldeweij, J., Spronk, R. et al. (eds.) (2016). Hieronymus Bosch. Painter and draughtsman. Catalogue raisonné. Stuttgart: Belser. 10 Martin Klüners Soul, Reason, Faith The psychological foundations of religion Quaestiones Religion and psychology have the concept of the soul in common. This is true despite the fact that, on the one hand, there are many different religions with at least as many ideas about the soul1 and that, on the other hand, the concept of a "soul" was largely banned from scientific consideration as early as the 19th century. It is the quality of the soul that unites religion and psychology that should give it a prominent position in our investigation. In order for it to fulfil this role, it is, of course, essential to point out its difficult status right at the beginning. For the soul - at the same time as religion, by the way - has become a problem. This can be exemplified by the doctrine of the soul itself, of psychology: The slogan of "psychology without a soul" (cf. Jüttemann, 1991, p. 354, p. 358 f.), which goes back to Friedrich Albert Lange and is basically an oxymoron in semantic terms, not only testifies in its affirmative character (Newmark, 2004, p. 57) to the positivist enthusiasm of its time of origin, but also denotes the attitude of the discipline towards its object of investigation, which is still valid in principle today (Hecht and Desnizza, 2012, p. 4). Psychoanalysis, for its part, uses the term "soul", but leaves its epistemological status far from clear. 1 Karl Wernhart (2004, p. 94 f.) undertakes a typologisation of the different concepts of the soul in the religions. On the junket of religion and soul, see Luhmann (2000, p. 267). 11 The term is largely open-ended and therefore, at first glance, lends it the character of a heuristic category (cf. Newmark, 2004, p. 52). The difficulty of the term is matched by an even greater difficulty in defining its content in the manner of demarcation. This endeavour touches on one of the central problems of at least Western philosophy, which, due to the epistemological implications it entails, is fundamental even for the entire architecture of virtually all scientific disciplines: the body-soul opposition, which represents a particularly pointed formulation of the relationship between matter and spirit. Obviously, matter is subject to other laws than the immaterially conceived spirit. Consequently, this means that both must be researched differently. Since the laws of matter are much easier to recognise, namely in the form of the known cause-effect relationship, than those of immateriality, the temptation, especially in modern times, under the impression of "Cartesian substance dualism" (Newmark, 2004, p. 45) as a culmination of the body-soul problem, is great to explain immateriality from materiality. This position, known as physicalism and common in its basic features since antiquity (Beckermann, 2011, p. 7, p. 9-11), is enjoying growing popularity, especially in times of significant scientific progress. For example, it was the undeniable successes of neuroscience that really sparked the more recent debates on human free will. Without being able to refer to the extensive epistemological discourses in detail at this point, we can at least state this much: One can confidently classify the aforementioned position as a fundamental category error (cf. Ryle, 1969; Gast, 2016, p. 69). Human freedom of will is not the result of neurological processes that can be reconstructed as "causal or material" (Newmark, 2000, p. 46). The same is true for all other mental or, in more traditional terms, mental processes. diction, "soul-spiritual" processes.2 2 If the soul is reduced to the physical, "the soul thus loses, at least immanently in theory, its main rationalist attribute: the hand- 12 If one accepts this definition, some elementary questions arise with regard to the fate of the soul - understood here as the totality of the mental characteristics of an individual: While the origin of the body from the fertilisation of a female egg by a male sperm cell, its further development in the sense of cell division and growing differentiation can be adequately explained on a physiological basis, the origin of the soul becomes a problem. If it is not identical with the body, what is it formed from? Similarly, when the life process of the body is completed and it dies, what happens to the soul? Thus, starting from epistemological reflections, we unexpectedly arrive at old familiar questions of metaphysics. Religion, which is more or less the same across cultures, albeit mostly under different conditions, is the subject of the same questions. questions, it's not far off. This brief outline of the complex problem already hints at the fact that the soul is central to human self-understanding. This is just as true for the religious ideas of pristine cultures as it is for highly abstract philosophical discourses in so-called enlightened societies. Of course, it seems that increasing rationalisation over the centuries is becoming more and more antagonistic to both the soul and religion. This can be stated without having to use the notorious catchword of the spirit as the adversary of the soul (Klages, 1929-1932). It is much more likely that, with Max Weber, "the mathematically oriented view of the world" fundamentally rejects any point of view which "asks for a 'sense' of inner-worldly events at all". Reason and faith, science and religion come into such deep contradiction with each other that at the provisional end of this development, after science seems to have triumphed over religion, the latter is even understood as "the irrational or anti-rational super-personal power par excellence". freedom, which is based on its freedom from all earthly heaviness" (Newmark, 2004, p. 48). Similarly, Ryle (1969, p. 20). 13 (Weber, 1920, p. 564).3 And this despite the fact that there were times, not even of short duration, when both searched hand in hand for truth: Modern Western rationality and the question "about the right concept of science" have their origins, based on ancient precursors, in the theology of the 11th century - when Berengar of Tours postulated "that dialectics must be studied because man is made in the image of God by reason and without the use of reason he irretrievably loses his dignity" (Ehlers, 2013, p. 58 f.). How then could it come about that reason and faith became enemies? Here, an attempt will be made to draw from a psychological perspective to find an answer. Since we consider the concept and problem of the soul (including the epistemological entanglements mentioned above) to be constitutive for this, a corresponding discussion serves as an introduction: First, the history of the soul will be sketched in brief form,4 in order to then discuss the relationship between "reason" (represented here by the historical and not, for example, a mathematical science, since the latter are not actually concerned with the creation of meaning) and "faith" in psychological terms. Psychological is not to be understood as a characteristic word that signifies belonging to a certain scientific discipline in the narrower sense;5 on the contrary, it also includes psychoanalytical approaches here, even to a great extent. This is not only due to the author's personal inclination, but also to the subject matter: Understanding meaning requires hermeneutic rather than explanatory methods. Especially when it comes to the "meaning" of religion under the aspect of the soul - a soul that we explicitly do not consider in a physicalistic way. 3 4 5 On types of religious criticism and the emergence of the sociology of religion from religious criticism, cf. Pickel (2011, pp. 60-65). The brevity of the explanations dictates a limitation of content, so that mainly the occidental history of the soul is meant. It should also be noted that the author is a historian by training. 14 A brief history of the soul The soul in early religions The fact that the problem of the origin of the soul outlined above is already - at least implicitly - preoccupying wild boarder cultures is illustrated by the belief in the so-called pitapitui among the Tiwi living on the islands of Bathurst and Melville off the north coast of Australia, "spirit children", who represent the souls of the as yet unborn children (Goodman, 1994, p. 88). In the "Dreamtime", as the mythical prehistory is called (cf. the section "Dreamtime and Dreaming", p. 38 f.), the spirit children were, according to the Tiwi, abandoned (Goodman, 1994, p. 99) so that the father could find them in his dreams and bring them to the mother (p. 93). Among the mainland Aborigines, a very similar conception exists: only when the spirit child has been passed on from the father to the mother or has also entered the mother's body directly, can an embryo come into being. Some tribes believe that after the death of the human being, the soul transforms again into a spirit child to be born anew at some point (Wernhart, 2004, p. 109). Incidentally, the idea of a soul given before birth is not limited to Australian aboriginal cultures; it can also be found in other forms among planter societies (K. E. Müller, 2005, p. 32; Goodman, 1994, p. 110). The question of whether there is something that outlasts the physical existence of the human being is therefore already very old. Inherent in this question is also the question of a sphere beyond the physical world (see the section "The other reality", p. 36 ff.). The answer that almost all cultures give to this consists in the conception of the soul and a reality in which it also exists independently of the body. Despite the diversity of the respective forms, this conception is "a human universal" (Wernhart, 2004, p. 93). In this context, not only human beings, but all animate beings, and sometimes even things, are said to possess one (or more) soul(s). The Greek usage of "apsy- chos" to denote the inanimate and "empsychos" to denote the animate, 15 expresses the middle of these ideas: what lives has a soul, i.e. animals and plants as well as humans. By animating the body, it receives life; if the soul leaves it, it dies (Beckermann, 2011, p. 8). The soul in occidental philosophy What the soul actually is, what it consists of, is only emphatically problematised in ancient philosophy. Materialists such as Democritus, Leucippus or Epicurus assume that the soul is something physical, a part of the body such as arms or ears. Lucretius locates the seat of the spirit connected with the soul in the chest, from where it gives the soul commands to move the limbs. Plato, on the other hand, believes in the independence of the soul, which represents the actual self of the human being and leaves the body after its death. Aristotle, on the other hand, interprets the soul as the principle of form of the body (Beckermann, 2011, pp. 9-15).6 Both Platonic and Aristotelian considerations remained virulent throughout the Middle Ages.7 In addition, Augustine postulated a hierarchisation of the relationship between body and soul that became decisive for Western thought; this was accompanied by the Christian "devaluation of the body" (Wulf, 1991, p. 5),8 but also by the statement that the soul cannot be explained by the body, and that its properties do not even include spatial expansion (Kersting, 1991, p. 65). Spatial expansion also becomes the defining criterion of the theory that marks the most momentous break with the hitherto 6 7 8 Mar- cus Knaup (2011) argues for a rehabilitation of Aristotelian hylemorphism. Mostly through the mediation of the Church Fathers: Augustine, PseudoDionysius and Boethius passed on Platonic ideas and thus ensured their dissemination among Christian authors; Aristotle became the basic reading at the universities that emerged from the 12th century onwards (Gersh and Hoenen, 2002, p. V). The doctrine of the incarnation of God and the bodily resurrection, on the other hand, contradict the explicit devaluation of the body. 16 This is what the current thinking about the relationship between body and soul is supposed to mean: In the 17th century, René Descartes separated the body-soul reality into the res extensa and the res cogitans, whereby the former could be completely explained in terms of mechanical laws. The soul becomes superfluous for the understanding of animate nature. Consequently, reality only comes to it as consciousness. After all, even according to Descartes, conscious thought cannot be traced back to the physical; his position therefore remains a sub-stance dualist one (Beckermann, 2011, pp. 15-19). Descartes' substance dualism separates the two areas, which makes the interplay between body and soul a real problem: it is hardly possible to explain how the substances interact with each other, how they are supposed to act on each other. Thus, in substance, this is a "causality problem" (Newmark, 2004, p. 44 f.). The four Aristotelian causal types are consequently interpreted in a new way - material and effect cause are combined to form "mechanical causality" and triumph over the teleological principle formed from form and purpose cause, which is no longer understood as a "scientific" category in the strict sense (Newmark, 2004, p. 56, notes 4 and 6). For it is useless for the study of nature. A sharp demarcation of the disciplines is just as much the consequence as the possibility of an experimentally proceeding natural science that is able to recognise natural laws (Newmark, 2004, p. 45 f.) and thus a specific form of natural order that can claim validity for the entire universe. The epistemological reduction - as such one must call the narrowing of "science" to material and effectual causalities - leads to a triumphant advance of the natural sciences, which seems to legitimise itself up to the present, above all through undeniable technical progress. In a certain sense, those sciences that deal with the spiritual expressions of human beings on a non-physical basis fall by the wayside. Even today, the humanities are under comparatively more pressure to justify themselves than the natural sciences, whose findings are based on the above-mentioned principles. 17 The human sciences are also professionalised thanks to a frantic effort to match the natural sciences in terms of "scientificity". At the same time, the professionalisation of the human sciences is due not least to the frantic effort to somehow equal the natural sciences in terms of "scientificity". The principle of verifiability of research results, which originated in the natural sciences, is the ideal that became the standard, especially from the 19th century onwards. For example, human history should now also be researched on the basis of verifiable, assured facts (cf. Rohbeck, 2004, p. 74; on this also the section "The interest in historical truth" in this text and, on the 20th century, Klüners, 2013, p. 132). Through the desecration of the natural world, the re-adjustment of the relationship between body and soul and the strict separation of disciplines, everything that lies on the nature-human line and has shaped interdisciplinary debates to this day in a very fundamental way actually becomes problematic in principle: not only the relationship between body and soul itself, but also the relationship between nature and culture or history in general,9 in the narrower sense of anthropology and philosophy of history, and on the epistemological level that of explaining and understanding (Klüners, 2013, 2014, 2017). However, this also means that the relationship to the "soul", which as a largely unchallenged category has at most only found refuge in theology, still at least implicitly determines man's thinking about himself, and can perhaps even be described as its - despite everything, immovable - pivot. 9 The significance of this problematic interrelation becomes particularly obvious in the phenomenon of scientific racism, which is perhaps the most radical example of a materialistic reduction of the body-soul problem in the broadest sense: For not only physical but also cultural differences between so-called "races" are to b e explained biologically, i.e. scientifically, with its help. Biologism is a particularly fatal form of category error. 18 Approaches to overcoming the opposition between explaining and understanding Incidentally, since the 20th century there have been approaches of completely different provenance that question the dichotomies mentioned: Analytic philosophy, of all things, which was oriented towards t h e scientific ideal of knowledge, attested to the explanatory function of historical narrative in the sense of the scientific model of knowledge (Danto, 1974, p. 230) and thus contributed to a defusing of the contrast between explaining and understanding, which is particularly disadvantageous for the humanities. Systems theory, for its part, explores the relationship between systems and their respective environments without qualitatively distinguishing between natural and human systems (Ropohl, 2012). The old anthropological question of the relationship between disposition and experience, i.e., to put it simply, the relationship between innate and learned human characteristics, is now increasingly answered in terms of a permanent interrelationship and no longer in terms of an opposition between genetic determinism and social constructivism (Antweiler, 2011, p. 196). 196).10 And one of the most elaborate forms of natural science, namely quantum mechanics, is even shaking conventional certainties regarding the universal validity of causalities with the help of experimental evidence. Philosophically, these findings are now actually discussed within the framework of a panpsychist position to the extent that even elementary particles are attributed proto- mental properties and the mind-body problem is attempted to be solved from this point (Brüntrup, 2018, p. 183). 10 The more recent cooperation between neuroscience and psychoanalysis is based on similar premises, for example in the study of mentalisation: the "mentalisation of experience" takes place by m e a n s of identification with the thinking of others. However, its internalisation can only take place "when the biological basis for it exists. Conversely, neurophysiological maturation alone does not bring about a mental representation of experience" (Ermann, 2010, p. 97 f.). 19 The soul sciences As far as those sciences are concerned that deal specifically with the soul, at least in name, a fundamental division of the disciplinary self-understanding along the dividing line of explaining and understanding can be observed: Psychology sees itself more as a natural science (Hecht and Desnizza, 2012, p. 8), while psychoanalysis can be classified as a hermeneutic science inspired by the natural sciences. The psychological disciplines are particularly affected by the fun- damental scientific theoretical discourses (Klüners, 2017, p. 107). In the second half of the 19th century, the view that the body is subject to the same causal laws as inanimate matter and can therefore be investigated by the same means, propagated by Hermann Helmholtz and Ernst Brücke, among others, also prevailed in medicine (Sonntag, 1991, p. 294; Newmark, 2004, p. 46). With his experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, a student of Helmholtz, developed a kind of psychology that adopted the reductionism (Sonntag, 1991, p. 294) of medicine and de facto transposed its object of investigation into the physical (Newmark, 2004, p. 47).11 Sigmund Freud, a student of the Brücke, on the other hand, chose a different path: he discovered that behind physical symptoms there is often a psychic cause. 11 On the crisis of psychology, cf. Jüttemann (1991). Incidentally, Dilthey attempted to psychologically underpin the understanding of the historically individual. This was the source of Collingwood's fierce criticism. For psychology is "not history, but natural science, a natural science founded on naturalistic principles", so if the knowledge of history is only possible with the help of a natural science, there is ultimately no genuine historical understanding (Collingwood, 1955, p. 184). Significantly, Collingwood accuses the German school of historical philosophy of never having emancipated itself "from philosophical naturalism, i.e. from the transformation of spirit into nature" (p. 187). For him, however, history is the antithesis of nature and the generic term for everything that cannot be grasped scientifically. History is not synonymous with any kind of change he explicitly excludes natural processes from his understanding o f history (p. 221; cf. Klüners, 2017, p. 108). 20 conflict, which can best be told in the form of a story. can be reproduced (Klüners, 2014, p. 103). Psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic inspired by the natural sciences This makes the psychoanalysis he founded a science that is essentially "historical" (Wehler, 1971, p. 19), although it is not primarily concerned with texts, but with patients, i.e. bodilymental entities. Consequently, the interaction of body and soul is its central theme, a quality that distinguishes it from text-based historical sciences, but which, conversely, also burdens it with epistemological problems that the text-based disciplines can largely neglect. On the basis of his findings, Freud is in a sense forced to overcome the sharp division between the natural sciences and the humanities; the consequ 79) that interweaves language and figures of thought from both fields. Already in the "Interpretation of Dreams" he puts the "teleology" (Freud uses the term there himself: 1900a, p. 78; cf. also Newmark, 2004, p. 50), which suggests a connection of meaning and thus a psychic function of the dream, back in its rightful place. At the same time, he ascribes to the soul "one of the main attributes of the body", "namely, unconsciousness", and attests to its inner organisation according to the principle of causality. This principle is of decisive importance for justifying his hypothesis of a psychic unconscious, since a purely conscious psyche "would show gaps in its causality series" (Newmark, 2004, p. 52 f.). Freud thus links causality and teleology (Newmark, 2004, p. 55). But how does psychoanalysis define this for its theorWhat is the relationship between body and soul that is so central to education? The relationship between body and soul in the understanding of psychoanalysis The answer lies in their interpretation of the relationship between Need (physical) and desire (psychological). The "big body 21 per needs" already create a tension stimulus in the infant that strives to be relieved, for example the hunger tension that is relieved by food intake. This experience of satisfaction creates a memory image of the corresponding perception, which "remains associated with the memory trace of the stimulation of need". However, as soon as the need - in our and Freud's example, hunger - arises again, a "psychic impulse" appears that re-occupies the memory image, ergo "actually wants to restore the situation of the first satisfaction. Such a stirring is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the wish-fulfilment [...]". (Freud, 1900a, p. 571). Lilli Gast draws attention to the fact that this first Freud already understood this as a "primitive thinking activity" and it stands, as it were, at the beginning of a "temporalisation of the subject". For it is the desire that exists in the present for a restoration in the future of a perception experienced as pleasant in the past that from now on forms the soul's complement to the bodily need. In psychoanalysis, this connection is "the psychophysical node" at which biologically based need and psyche meet (Gast, 2016, p. 73). The causality of the somatic tension stimulus is intertwined with the teleology of the desire.12 The physical origin of the intention, which is assumed by the analytic philosophy of mind, for example, to be the cause of action, therefore lies first and foremost in a tension stimulus, as the meaning of the word "intendere" = to tense already indicates; the goal of the action would consequently consist at its most elementary level in the removal of a state of tension (Klüners, 2015, p. 506). Perhaps Freud had concepts and models in mind from the time of his studies with Franz Brentano, when he defined the drive "as the psychic representation of an [...] innersomatic state". 12 Cf. also Laplanche and Pontalis (1972, p. 441 f.) on the d r i v e : according to them, "the drive does indeed have its source in organic p h e n o m e n a ", but "the goal it strives for" (emphasis M. K.), together with the "object[s] to which it attaches itself", is responsible for its see- lical "fate". Because he has a goal, this fate is to be understood teleologically. 22 source of stimulation" (Freud, 1905d, p. 67). For Freud's "representation" is suspiciously reminiscent of the philosophical terminology used to characterise the relationship between the intention and the object to which it is directed in terms of a "representation" of the object in the mental state. The drive strives to resolve the somatic state of tension via an object (e.g. food) - and the object is an intentional object (Klüners, 2015, p. 506).13 However, the drive is not identical with the somatic stimulus source itself (Gast, 2016, p. 74), and thus does not refer to anything biological, but rather to something psychological - which would partially invalidate the criticism that later ignited against Freud's drive theory, which allegedly cemented unchangeable natural laws (cf. Klüners, 2013, p. 151 f.). On the other hand, the drive is "an inbetween, a change of register, and this in the sense of the translation of a work demand emanating from the body(-liche)" (Gast, 2016, p. 74). The relationship between somatic arousal and psychic representation is thus that of a delegation relationship (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, p. 442), which would highlight the prius of the body before the soul. The possible consideration of whether a kind of "will to live", understood as a mental entity,14 first sets bodily self-preservation functions and thus needs in motion, is not found in this model - but conversely does not exclude it either. It is important to note that the dialectic of body and psyche is a question of "reciprocal transgressions", a "causeless figure that resists causalities" (Gast, 2016, p. 75). 13 There I wrote that the need is "based" on the drive. If one understands the drive as the psychic representation of the bodily stimulus, then the reverse is probably more correct. However, Laplanche and Pontalis (1972) point out that "drive" is a "borderline term between the somatic and the psychic" (p. 441) and can denote both the "somatic force" and the "psychic energy" (p. 527). This is probably the principally insoluble question of the prius of chicken or egg (cf. below). 14 The panpsychistic view that living beings, and even elementary particles, possess mental properties, brings such an assumption into the realm of possibility. Mental characteristics could already be assumed in the embryo or the zygote. 23 Through this dialectical understanding of the mutual interaction of body and soul, Freud not only abolished the radical Cartesian separation, he also rehabilitated the concept of the soul, which originated in the religious world of imagination, was discussed in Western philosophy for centuries and ultimately banished from the scientific view of the world, thus making a more holistic interpretation of the human possible again (cf. also Newmark, 2004, p. 55). According to our thesis, the principles that Freud discovered in the study of the soul are ultimately also constitutive for the relationship between "reason" and "faith". Schematically expressed, it is the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle that is reflected in this dichotomy. "Reason": The Sense of Tracking The trackers of the San In 2013, the German Research Foundation funded an unusual project: three members of a hunter-gatherer culture still living today were to help western researchers interpret traces of Stone Age hunter-gatherers in caves in southern France. The footprints that can be seen in the clay soil of the caves are attributed to the people who created the famous rock paintings and other artistic artefacts in the Upper Palaeolithic. Like the works of art, they have survived there over the millennia and represent a remarkable snapshot of the life of a prehistoric population far before the invention of writing. Since the conventional methods of investigation - which essentially consisted of measuring the tracks were considered insufficient, the trackers C/wi /Kxunta, C/wi G/aqo De!u and Tsamkxao Ciqae from the San people in northeastern Namibia were invited to Europe for two weeks in July 2013 to "prove Western science wrong", so to speak: In the words of the project leader Lenssen-Erz 24 the strictly fact-based methods of the San were "much more precise", their empirical findings - namely, in the best sense of the word, through exact observation - were not only more differentiated, but also more unambiguous "in comparison to the measurements made so far". The trackers, who had a "highly specific vocabulary" in this respect, discussed "the smallest details and put the clues together to form a whole story". They were thus able to determine not only the age and sex of the person in question, for example, but also their posture, speed and the like on the basis of a few footprints - something that would never have been possible in such a precise and complex form with the instruments available to modern scientists. It is therefore not surprising that many of the previously valid assumptions about the origin and "meaning" of the traces preserved in the caves had to be revised through the use of the san (DFG, 2013). The interest in historical truth The example illustrates the following in particular: A in the broadest sense The "historical" interest in "how things actually were" (Ranke, 1885, p. 7; emphasis M. K.), the interest in a precise, "forensic" reconstruction of the past by means of an exact analysis of facts and seemingly insignificant circumstantial evidence (Ginzburg, 1985), which led to the professionalisation of historical science in Western societies in the 19th century at the latest, is basically not a modern specificity. It can obviously already be found among game hunters, even if the deciphering of - mostly rather recent (cf. DFG, 2013) - tracks is, of course, a strategy in the context of hunting and serves to ensure survival, not to complete or correct an image of history. The principle, however, is the same. Certainly: modern historical science - and here goes The "German model" that became the model for almost all disciplines of cultural studies in the 19th century, both nationally and internationally (Simon, 1996, p. 203). 25 worthy of more detailed consideration - has emerged from the study of texts, not footprints. In its origins, it is primarily the work of studied philologists such as Ranke and Droysen.15 It may have turned to other media of transmission in the meantime, but written sources are still traditionally and primarily its object. The selfconfidence of historical scholarship - despite certain slights caused by the race to catch up by other disciplines in the humanities, especially the social sciences (Simon, 1996, pp. 204-209), as well as ever new "turns" usually originating from these very disciplines - is initially based on a good reason: writing offers an unparalleled condensation of information because it is based on language. It is in the nature of language that its information density far exceeds that of non-linguistic backgrounds. Shards of clay, artefacts, even pictures do not "speak" to us in the same way as language itself written on clay tablets, temple walls or parchment. And in contrast to the interview conducted in the context of ethnological field research, for example, which is ideally also written down but can naturally only cover a comparatively short period of time, historical written testimonies sometimes link periods of several thousand years. Thus it is possible that even Sumerians and Egyptians of the Pharaonic period "speak" to us. With the means of textual criticism and the theory of understanding (Simon, 1996, p. 198), an incomparably precise analysis and interpretation of what is communicated in the source can be carried out (without, of course, automatically saying something about the historical "truth"; cf. 15 In addition to the fact that they studied philology, both are said to have been decisively influenced by northern and central German Protestantism: Ranke through additional studies in theology, Droysen through growing up in a Protestant pastor's household. Recall Thomas Mann's early story "Disappointment" to get an impression of how much significance the word has in this sphere of what the story calls "pulpit rhetoric" (Mann, 1997, p. 97). Moreover, both Ranke and Droysen worked for most of their lives in the North German Plain, a landscape that has been characterised as "imageless". Where there are few images, the word is the logical substitute and fills the void. 26 et al. White, 1991 and the discussions that followed). And it has been proven more than once that only a close look at the sources is capable of overturning historical "certainties" - this fact was certainly the decisive moment in the formation of historical scholarship, which took place above all in demarcation from religious and philosophical historical narratives.16 An example from medieval studies, familiar to the author due to his own recent studies17 , may serve as a pars pro toto to illustrate the still current and unbroken importance of solid source analysis: Until the 1990s, the prevailing doctrine (popularised not least by textbooks) was that the "feudal system", understood as a client relationship between a land-granting lord and his vassals providing military assistance, not only originated in the early Middle Ages, i.e. in the 7th or 8th century, but also in the Middle Ages. 16 The author to whom we owe the concept of the philosophy of history Voltaire - was already thinking about how the enlightened historian should actually deal with his object of study - history. When studying the old chronicles, which date back to the time of Bossuet, i.e. almost up to Voltaire's present time, were oriented towards salvation history (cf. Löwith, 1953, p. 100) and, in view of their linking of inner-worldly events with the numinous, were in principle religious texts, Voltaire had noticed that the picture of history that they conveyed was in part considerably inconsistent, and not infrequently even completely distorted and falsified by fabulous additions. So what should the historian do in such a situation, in Voltaire's eyes, in order to obtain a more correct, more coherent picture of history, and thus ultimately to understand history better? (After all, it is difficult to learn from a distorted history). Voltaire put it this way: "Chez toutes les nations l'histoire est défigurée par la fable, jusqu'à ce qu'enfin la philosophie vienne éclairer les hommes" (Voltaire, 1963, p. 800 f.). The solution therefore consists in philosophical, i.e. reason-guided, knowledge. The historian, enlightened by philosophy, should make use of his intellect, dissolve the fabulous distortions with the help of his critical intellect, analyse history, so to speak, with regard to rationally verifiable facts. Voltaire anticipates here what the source criticism of historicism developed in the 19th century takes up again in a more complex and systematic form. 17 The result of my own efforts in this field, dedicated to the feudal system under Duke Albrecht I of Habsburg, is expected to appear in 2020. 27 The social order of the Middle Ages was not only based on the family, but was also the main pillar of the medieval social order. In the late Middle Ages, it increasingly gave way to other forms of social ties (cf. Patzold, 2012). It was not until the fundamental study by Susan Reynolds (1994), who finally took the trouble to comprehensively examine the early medieval sources with regard to the current research thesis, that the latter was shaken to such an extent that a "picture of the past", which had been shared internationally by leading scholars up to that point and was also widespread outside the discipline, now hardly seems debatable. The emergence of the feudal system is no longer dated before the end of the 11th century, it is only considered to be one of many group ties and its actual heyday is estimated to be in the late Middle Ages, in stark contrast to the previously valid assumption (Patzold, 2012; Dendorfer, 2004). In this way, a "myth" of research was refuted through precise examination of the historical evidence, in this case mainly documents, and thus the legitimacy of the historical research approach was once again vividly demonstrated. Limits of historical science as a science of consciousness Conversely, the excessive importance historians attach to writing (ness) often enough obscures their view of the limits of their understanding. To put it bluntly, the historian only believes what is available to him "in black and white" (or what he himself reads from it). The attention to detail that is indispensable in precise textual analysis not infrequently leads to a pedantry that often gives the detail precedence over the overall context. The latter, in fact, offers far less support in comparison to the solid ground of what is fixed in writing and is more like that "swampland" over which, according to Popper (1935, p. 66 f.), the "pillar construction" of scientific theories is erected18 - whereby it should perhaps be added that 18 Norbert Elias (2002, p. 63; cf. Klüners, 2016, p. 650, note 9) already made a similar criticism of historiography. 28 historical scholarship is often content with merely framing the pillars without trying to construct an overly complex theological edifice out of them.19 The fear of losing traction, even of impending doom, is likely to play a not insignificant role in the tension often felt in German history seminars, or at least in the historian's fixation on his source texts - they at least provide him with a sufficiently dense fabric on which he bases his modest (and, as I said, often incomplete) constructions in the great swamp of historical facts. Popper's metaphor of the swamp evokes associations that perhaps point to a deeper problematic: At the end of the "31st Lecture on Introduction to Psychoanalysis" Freud compares the transformation of "id" into "ego" to the "draining of the Zuydersee" (Freud, 1933a, p. 86). A few pages earlier he calls the id a "chaos", a "cauldron full of seething excitations" (Freud, 1933a, p. 80). Chaos and swamp are linked by the amorphous, the dissolving of fixed distinctions. The "seething excitations", for their part, raise the descriptive images to an emotional level, as it were. The following hypothesis is suggested by this metaphor: The source texts on which the historian bases his statements are solid ground for him because they correspond to consciousness, while the surrounding swampland corresponds to reality that is not recorded in writing and can at most be reconstructed through forms of cognition beyond source exegesis (the "other" reality, so to speak). In contrast to the written word, this sphere is not so easily verifiable. Thus it has a structural parallel to the nonconscious, which is also difficult to control. The emotional component is expressed in the formulation of "seething excitement". And in fact, emotions are largely responsible for the self-image of the discipline: only the verifiable provides real security. 19 Of course, this does not apply to the theorists of the subject, who, however, within the "guild" often have a rather difficult stand. 29 Uncertainty, on the other hand, causes fear. From a psychological point of view, historians' fear of the unverifiable, the non-written, the non-conscious is, to put it bluntly, nothing other than the fear of the unconscious. Written testimonies, on the other hand, offer "security" because they are usually written with a conscious intention; in any case, the decisive participation of consciousness is indispensable for the production of writtenness (cf. Klüners, 2016, p. 658).20 (This even applies to fictional texts, even if reading between the lines, which exceeds the narrow framework of the reconstruction of conscious intentions, falls within the remit of literary studies). The fixation on consciousness also explains the conspicuous aversion of historical studies to psychoanalytical questions and theories compared to other human sciences.21 Talking about the non-conscious is superficially regarded as speculative and thus unserious. Thus, although historical scholarship offers solid critical-philological work on the historical source text, it does not lean too far out of the window within the framework of the hermeneutics of understanding - which, incidentally, is hardly ever really reflected upon in terms of its theoretical foundations and problems by the majority of the more practically oriented historians. This, too, may be seen as an expression of solidity. However, there are clear limits to historical knowledge. The most obvious limitation of a fixation on scriptural evidence is its temporal dimension: the history of scripture, as we know, does not begin before the fourth millennium B.C. and thus does not even account for one percent of the history of the genre whereby it should also be added that the use of scripture was initially limited to geographically extremely small areas and spread only comparatively slowly. Moreover, the focus on conscious, written human utterances neglects basically everything, 20 21 Wehler's plea to also consider sources as overdetermined and therefore to examine them with psychoanalytical methods went l a r g e l y unheard (Wehler, 1971, p. 16). Jürgen Straub (1988, pp. 17-22) has summarised the reservations. Of course there are exceptions, for these cf. Klüners (2013, p. 21, note 21; 2016, p. 645); Röckelein (1999a, pp. 288-299; 1999b, pp. 3-21). 30 what defines human beings beyond writing, or at least beyond consciousness - and thus fundamental facts of their existence. That there is more between heaven and earth than human consciousness is probably known even to the specialist historian; only he does not usually concern himself further with it. Incidentally, the historian's fetishism of consciousness as an expression of a deeply felt fear of the uncontrollable has quite clearly identifiable historical causes: it became virulent when narratives that had been valid (in the broadest sense of the word) for centuries lost their persuasive power.22 Consequently, this does not begin with the critique of the philosophy of history, which is generally regarded as the founding document of modern historical science - it already begins with Voltaire, i.e. before there was a philosophy of history in the emphatic sense at all. It was the chronicles inspired by salvation history whose fabulous inconsistencies Voltaire wanted to resolve with the help of reason (cf. note 16). According to him and his contemporaries, inner-worldly events could no longer be traced back to the action o f God. Nevertheless, central - especially apocalyptic - patterns of thought remained unconsciously or preconsciously (thus the philosophy of history is basically not much more than a philosophy of history). 22 The fact that German historians in the sense described feel a particularly great fear of the uncontrollable, indeed that it was Germans who actually invented critical historiography in the first place, may (cum grano salis) be related to the effectiveness of cultural narratives: The world empire doctrine, according to which the Roman Empire (in whose tradition the Holy Roman Empire, which existed until 1806, saw itself) held up the Antichrist, was widespread in Germany - significantly, especially in the Protestant area, from which Ranke and Droysen came - well into the 18th century, above all through what Goez called "the most widespread school history book in the Protestant world", the little chronicle of Johan- nes Sleidan (Goez, 1958, p. 279). The renowned medievalist Herbert Grundmann already described it as the "fate" of the "German people", "that it became the bearer of this idea of empire when other nations were still did not find the strength to realise an overall political order. As a result, however, the impact of medieval views of time and empire has been imprinted on our history, our political and spiritual life more deeply and lastingly than on any other people, and for this reason we are more than others compelled and obliged to understand the Middle Ages in order to understand ourselves" (Grundmann, 1977, p. 219). 31 as a secularised theology of history; Löwith, 1953; cf. in the following the section "Das Schuldgefühl als wichtigstes Pro- blem der Kulturentwicklung"). And thus, after this psychoanalytically informed excursus on the historical science treated by us as a proxy for the rational principle, we have come back to the actual subject of the essay, "Reli- gion". The reality principle As already explained: Tracking in the sense of a meticulous reconstruction of the past based on real facts is not something that was invented in modern times. And the associated refutation of "myths" is not a privilege of modern science either: the trackers of the San were able, through the finer methods of their "science", to identify the This is why the "myths" of prehistorians about Stone Age cave visitors can be exposed as untrue, just as the critically proceeding sciences of modern times generally do with "myths". Factchecking is thus not bound to stages of cultural development for which, according to a certain theory, so-called "operational thinking" would be a necessary prerequisite (cf. Hallpike, 1984 and the following). Rather, it is a form of reality reference that is probably as old as the genre itself. What is decisive is that with the departure of religion, this form of reference to reality fully penetrates areas that were previously a matter of that very religion or of cultural memory (understood in the sense of Jan Assmann, cf. Assmann, 2018, especially pp. 48-66). A "shift" takes place here that applies the reality principle to cultural memory itself. In psychoanalysis, the reality principle is the control mechanism of the psyche that takes into account the conditions of the outside world. It is ontogenetically responsible for the "development of conscious functions, attention, judgement" and "memory", even for the "emergence of thinking, which is defined as a 'trial action' [...]". The "substitute 32 of motor discharge" occurs "through an action that aims at an appropriate transformation of reality" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, p. 428). The latter two points form a parallel to the reflections of the sociologist Günter Dux, according to whom the human organism is dependent on entering into a reflexive relationship with its motor system, "to form the structure of the action and that of a system of action as a form of connection" in order to be able to realise the satisfaction of needs. The "teleological meaningfulness" of the system of action "is an expression of the necessity of having to organise the satisfaction of the basic needs oneself". The temporalisation of the motor system is the prerequisite for this (Dux, 1989, p. 44). As with Freud, need refers to the connection between the external world and the temporal internal organisation of the body (p. 41). It is a kind of psychological con- sense that can be established here between Dux's sociological argumentation and the psychoanalytic understanding of the reality principle - for Dux essentially follows that developmental psychologist whose of considerable influence on the scientific discourse of the 20th century: Jean Piaget (who, for his part, incidentally was not entirely uninfluenced by Freud; cf. Kohler, 2009, p. 87). This is also the reason for decisive parallels between Dux and the work of the ethnologist Christopher Hallpike, who based his own highly regarded theory on "The Foundations of Primitive Thinking" on Piaget's developmental psychology. Hallpike also emphasises with Piaget the importance of "actions and their coordination", which come first in the acquisition of knowledge about the world, followed by images, symbols and ultimately sign systems such as language (Hallpike, 1984, p. 41). Freud, however, goes beyond Piaget, Dux and Hallpike in that he also considers the achievement of satisfactions in the real external world, which the reality principle guarantees, to be constitutive, but conversely leaves no doubt about the power of its great antagonist, the pleasure principle, which rules over the unconscious (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, p. 428). From a historical point of view and with reference to the example of the trackers, it is important to note that the reality principle applies to the relationship of the trackers. 33 The visible world, as it is today, must be grasped in its parts relevant to existence - in the case of hunters and gatherers, this means, to repeat, that "it is necessary for securing subsistence through gathering and hunting" (Dux, 1989, p. 185). For the San, by the way, not only the reading of animal but also human tracks is essential: it is suitable, for example, "to recognise, with a glance at the village board, which inhabitant walked in which direction how long ago, how far away he has consequently moved or whether strangers have intruded" (DFG, 2013). Not only animal behaviour, but also human actions can be the object of tracking. Consequently, a history is reconstructed (cf. above).23 Since we are dealing with traces that exist physically and not in writing, which are questioned as to their implicit "meaning", a comparison with archaeology, which the British philosopher of history Robin George Collingwood once elevated "to the key of a general theory of the sciences" (Honneth, 2005, p. 221), is closer than the comparison with text-based historical science. Among the historical sciences, it is indeed characterised by a special holism, since it is dependent on both scientific methods (for example, in the form of radiocarbon dating, strontium analysis, etc.) and on "hermeneutics", on understanding the meaning hidden behind the traces (Klüners, 2017). Here, there is an almost complete structural correspondence with the technique of reading traces, for this too requires a (proto-) "scientific" investigation of the sensually perceptible - the size, the depth, the structure of the traces - in connection with a reconstruction of the inner meaning of this sensually perceptible. 23 Ginzburg suggests that the model of narrative could have its roots in the tracking of hunter cultures, because the hunter had to arrange the tracks to be interpreted in the sense of a narrative sequence: "The hunter was thus perhaps the first to 'tell a story', since it was only given to him to read out a coherent sequence of events from the silent (barely perceptible) evidence left by his prey" (Ginzburg, 1985, p. 136; similarly Ginzburg, 1983, p. 70). 34 The double character of the word "sense" alluded to in the formulation - on the one hand to designate the sense of perception, on the other hand intrinsic sense, i.e. both "external" and "internal" sense in John Locke's definition (Ulfig, 1999, p. 379) (cf. on this also Rüsen, 2013, p. 35) - refers to the doubly conceived world with which even the Palaeolithic tracker had to live: the sensuously experienced and the sensuously "constructed" world. Ideally, they form a unity. "Sense" The fact that the word "sense" encompasses both aspects at the same time makes a consideration of its etymology seem adequate. The Duden dictionary of origins reads: "The entire Germ[anic] word group is based on the Idg. root *sent- 'to go, to travel, to drive', the original meaning of which was probably 'to take a direction, to search for a track'". The same applies to the terms in other languages that go back to the Latin "sensus". The activity word "sinnen" lost its original meaning "to go, to travel" in early Middle High German, but "in addition to the predominant meaning 'to think about', it has retained the directional sense 'to strive, to plan, to intend' [...]". (Duden, 1989, p. 675). The "Indo-European root" points far back into the past - if the meaning reconstructed here had already applied to Proto-IndoEuropean, one would have already penetrated deep into Neolithic times, more precisely into the sixth or even seventh millennium BC (Haarmann, 2010, p. 42). Tracking or, more generally, orienting oneself in a concretely given environment in accordance with the above-mentioned "teleological" principle of action (Dux, 1989, p. 44). 44), according to this linguistic reconstruction, would be the original content of the term "sense", as used at least in the Indo-European language family, and thus of the "most general, non-transcendable medium for every formation of form that mental and social systems can use" (Luhmann, 35 2000, S. 15). According to Luhmann, all such systems define and reproduce their operations solely in the medium mentioned (p. 16). However, he argues that no system is capable of capturing any adaptations to the environment by means of cognition (Pickel, 2011, p. 122). Luhmann thus agrees in principle with Freud, who actually only uses a slightly different terminology; Luhmann's "unobservable" has structural similarities with the "unconscious" of psycho-analysis. According to Luhmann, the problem of communicating about meaning that is actually "inaccessible to consciousness" first requires the use of metaphors "such as dahintersein, in-something-ness, invisibility, unimageability" (Luhmann, 2000, p. 41). The unobservability of the system - or the lack of conscious availability and controllability of the unconscious - is constitutive for the emergence of religion: "If the world and the constant presupposed adaptability of the systems elude observation and even more so cognitive processing: How then can the system develop something like trust in meaning? And the assumption is not entirely far-fetched that religion is responsible for this" (Luhmann, 2000, p. 47). "Faith": From the visible to the invisible things The other reality It is no coincidence that the distinction between the observable and the unobservable (Luhmann, 2000, p. 34) is reminiscent of the old theological difference between the visible and the invisible.24 Gert Pickel equates Luhmann's distinction with that of the observable and the unobservable. 24 The Christian historical exegetes, too, saw their task as being to to question "visible" history with regard to the invisible work of God. Cf. among others the prologue of the fourth book of the Chronicle of Otto of Freising (Otto von Freising, 1960, p. 290) and above all Augustine's "De civitate Dei" (Augustine, 1955, p. 10, p. 14). On Augustine, cf. further Kersting (1991, p. 61). 36 "between the observable this world and the unobservable beyond". Later Luhmann replaces it with that of immanence and transcendence, which in his view determines the signi- ficantly religious (Pickel, 2011, p. 125). Even savage cultures already distinguish between a sensually perceptible world and a non-sensually perceptible world, "invisible" world: "the other reality", as the ethnologist Felicitas Goodman calls it.25 Goodman recognises parallels between Pristine views of this other reality and Plato's doctrine of ideas.26 The "duality of reality" seems to be a universal that transcends time and culture (Goodman, 1994, p. 56, cf. also p. 17), although the concrete form that the invisible world takes in the imaginations of different peoples is to be understood as a "dependent variable" and is modelled on the real environment. Thus, for example, wildboarder cultures believe that in the Otherworld they encounter the spirits of animals familiar to them from the real world, whereas horticulturists assume settlements in the Otherworld that resemble their own (p. 60). While the hunter-gatherer approach to the sensually perceptible outside world must be a realistic one in the aspects important for survival, the most consistent form of which we have seen in the model of tracking, the "other" reality is fundamentally grasped by other means than the sensually perceptible world. If, in psychoanalytic terminology, the reality principle is indispensable for orientation in the real environment, then, according to our thesis, the image of the other reality is under the decisive influence of that principle which is the "avoidance" or "avoidance" principle. 25 This is the title of the comparative ethnological study of religions by Felicitas Goodman (1994). On the "other reality" among savage peoples, cf. Good- man, 1994, pp. 94-103. 26 Goodman quotes a member of the Oglala Sioux in this regard as follows: Chief "Crazy Horse dreamed and entered the world where there are only the spirits of all things. This is the real world that is behind that one, and everything we see here is only a shadow of what is in that other one" (Goodman, 1994, p. 59). 37 serves the "discharge of the unpleasant tension" and which Freud calls the "pleasure principle" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, p. 297). As said, the pleasure principle dominates above all the unconscious. Dreamtime and dream One of the cardinal approaches to the unconscious in psychoanalysis is the dream. It is also the model for the "dreamtime" (on this cf. Bowie, 2008, pp. 128-131), as the Aborigines call the "mythical period of creation", "the process of shaping, forming and giving meaning to all life" (Wernhart, 2004, p. 117).27 Günter Dux describes dreamtime as the "substantiallogical version of the incomprehensible events in the origin of time and space" (Dux, 1989, p. 173). In his historiography, Rüsen (2013, p. 47) distinguishes between the world of myth, which he equates with "dreamtime", and the world of history, which contains innerworldly events.28 According to Assmann, dreamtime is the meaningful term for the "absolute past", which in "cold" societies denotes eternity (Assmann, 2018, p. 78). Thus, "dreamtime" does not only refer to the imaginary world of concrete Australian tribes, but is basically used as a synonym for "myth" per se. 's as a kind of "waking dream of the peoples". Myth and (waking) dream are linked by the moment of fantasy. It stands in striking contrast to the principle that regulates access to the real environment, the reality principle discussed above. Freud analyses fantasies in the "Interpretation of Dreams" according to the pattern of daydreams and demonstrates that their structure corresponds to that of the nocturnal dream (Laplanche and P o n t a i s , 1972, p. 390). Freud, however, defines the nocturnal dream itself as "wish fulfilment" (Freud, 1900a, p. 127; heading to chapter 3). 27 Jan Assmann equates it with "festival time" (Assmann, 2018, p. 57). 28 History can, of course, become religion when it refers to real inner-worldly events (Rüsen, 2013, p. 48; Assmann, 2018, p. 296). 38 In principle, all formations of the unconscious, i.e. in addition to dreams, also symptoms or fantasies. Conscious and unconscious fantasies modify the grasp of the real just as much as actions (Klüners, 2015, p. 506). Indeed, "the life of the subject in its entirety" can be understood as "shaped by [...] a system of fantasies", which in turn have the task of staging wishes (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, p. 392 f.). Freud explains the special - seemingly irrational - character of the images of the unconscious with the example of the dream with the preservation of a fantasy from early childhood, i.e. "primary mode of operation of the psychic apparatus, abandoned as inexpedient", which had to be abandoned in the outside world with progressive maturation, but which still asserts itself, among other things, in sleep: "Dreaming is a piece of the overcome childhood soul life" (Freud, 1900a, p. 572 f.). If we may assume with Luhmann that the main purpose of systems is the reduction of complexity (Pickel, 2011, p. 123), then the findings can also be applied in this generality to dream work and productions of the unconscious in general: The manifest dream content, the symptom, the phantasy prove to be reductions of complexity primarily because of their condensed, overdetermined character. It is similar with myth. The Irrational: Myth and the Unconscious Freud is basically to be agreed with in interpreting myths and religious ideas in terms of those psychic processes and principles that he was able to study in particular in the analysis of dreams. The irrational character of these ideas according to the standards of the reality principle, which forms the basic prerequisite for the fact that in the course of increasing rationalisation and thus also polarisation "reason" and "faith" could be understood as a pair of opposites at all, can probably be explained most satisfactorily if it is understood as an expression of psychic realities and its relations to the unconscious are illuminated. The "system of the unconscious", as Freud called it in his 39 treatise on the unconscious, bears many features that are inherent in myth as a "time of timelessness" (Wernhart, 2004, p. 19): "The processes of the system Ubw are timeless, i.e. they are not temporally ordered, are not altered by the passing of time, have no relation to time at all. [...] Nor do the Ubw processes know any consideration of reality. [...] Lack of contradiction, primary process (mobility of the occupations), timelessness and replacement of external reality by psychic reality are the characters that we can expect to find in processes belonging to the Ubw system" (Freud, 1915e, p. 286). This in turn additionally supports the assumption that the ideas about the "other" reality are processes belonging to the unconscious. The methodological problem with the psychoanalytical interpretation of myths, however, is the application of techniques gained from the interpretation of individual (day)dreams to non-individual imaginary worlds. Thus, the individual dream and the wish fulfilment expressed through it can hardly be resolved without knowledge of the personal history of the dreamer. But what should take the place of the personal story in the analysis of myths?29 One might assume that the myth, structurally similar to the dream, represents a processing of all those "expectations, hopes and longings" which, according to Karl Wernhart, stand in an "interwoven holistic relationship to transcendence (literally understood as the dimension that goes beyond the consciousness of man)" and in this form form a religious universal (Wernhart, 2004, p. 11). But just as the indi- vidual dream also depends to a large extent on specific environmental experiences, so, as already discussed, it is a question of the The "other" reality is also a "dependent variable", 29 Similar problems arise when psychoanalytic methods are applied to the hermeneutic interpretation of texts (cf. Straub, 1999, pp. 280-295, with reference to Alfred Lorenzer). 40 which can only be meaningfully interpreted in knowledge of the history and the concrete relationship of the society in question to the environment. The importance of personal biography for the individual interpretation of dreams is thus matched in the interpretation of religious ideas by knowledge of the respective society, ideally in the context of comparative cultural research. Freud himself was particularly lacking in such knowledge, which is why his attempts at totemism (Freud, 1912-1913a) or monotheistic religion (Freud, 1939a) must be considered to have largely failed, even though in these writings, too, one can occasionally find quite connectable thoughts (Klüners, 2013, pp. 211-248). Developmental psychology or psychoanalysis? Apart from the methodological difficulties, criticism arises from the fact that Freud's terminology, which he transferred unconcernedly to cultural facts, owed itself mainly to the study of pathological phenomena.30 The aforementioned ethnologist Christopher Hallpike therefore considers the psychoanalytical theory of repression to be unsuitable for an adequate and exhaustive interpretation of the "unconscious symbolism" that underlies religious ideas: The term "repression" can at most explain a part of unconscious symbol formation, and the unconscious encompasses much more than just the repressed psychic. On the other hand, the potential for explaining "primitive thinking" is far greater than Freud's concept of repression. "conceptual realism" in the sense of Jean Piaget (Hallpike, 1984, p. 189 f.).31 Hallpike's criticism of the psychoanalytic theory of repression could, however, be countered that not all unconsciousness is a matter of the mind. 30 The contemporary critique from the time of the emergence of psychoanalysis was similar (Newmark, 2004, p. 53). 31 Hallpike uses the term "primitive" in a value-neutral way, in the sense of "primal" (1984, p. 9). Piaget's influence is also clearly audible in the following formulation: "[...] every assimilation which is not equilibrated by accommodations and which does not lead to deliberate 41 The "unconscious" is composed in its core "of drive representations that want to carry away their occupation, i.e., of the unconscious". In his famous treatise on "The Unconscious", Freud writes that the unconscious is composed at its core "of drive representations that want to discharge their occupation, i.e. of wishful emotions" (Freud, 1915e, p. 285). Desire arousal as such therefore has deeper roots, and from a psychoanalytical perspective it cannot be reduced to the "repressed" and corresponds in its origin to the ubiquitous physical "need", the central importance of which Hallpike also recognises, as already indicated in the section "The relationship between body and soul in the understanding of psychoanalysis". Consequently, in our opinion, it makes little sense, in the course of considering which psychological theory should explain the peculiarities of the The author is of the opinion that psychoanalysis can be played off against Piagetian developmental psychology if it can be interpreted most conclusively as "primitive", "wild" or religious thinking. Their respective emphases are so different that they must hardly be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather as mutual complements. Cognitive development and affective-libidinal development run parallel to each other in time; therefore, the latter may perhaps be understood in a certain sense as the "substructure" of the former. Accordingly, Hans G. Furth defines the libido as the motivational force that underlies the accommodations in the first place; Piaget dealt with the how, i.e. above all with organisation, mechanisms and structures, whereas Freud dealt with the why, i.e. the emotive, drive-economic and energetic aspects of actions and symbol formation (Furth, 1990, especially p. 14 f., p. 21-25).32 32 generalisations remains unconscious in the affective as well as in the intellectual sphere" (p. 190). Ultimately, Freud and Piaget only set different accents. For Freud, human consciousness is fed from two sources, the inner and the outer world: "The content of the Vbw (or Bw) system derives in part from instinct life (through the mediation of the Ubw), and in part from perception" (Freud, 1915e, p. 293; cf. also p. 302 f.). This necessitates two different world or selfreferences, the difference between which 42 Piaget's "conceptual realism" offers a convincing analysis of the "how", i.e. the cognitive mechanisms that are ultimately capable of forming certain world views. Conceptual realism is characteristic of the child's experience in the pre-operational stage, which has not yet learned to differentiate between the subjective image of an object and its actual properties. For example, children usually attribute the fact that their own muscular strength is activated when lifting a stone to a "force" inherent in the stone. According to Hallpike (1984, p. 31 f.), conceptual realism is decisively responsible for the emergence of animistic notions and is the basis for the development of the conceptual realism. "These peoples differed from modern Western culture primarily in the greater weight they attached to pictorial, non-linguistic symbolic ideas (p. 165). As already indicated in the section on "The Reality Principle", Hallpike, again based on Piaget and in agreement with Günter Dux, who was in turn influenced by Piaget, is convinced that action coordination and not language is the first model for ordering the world in a child's life (p. 41).34 naturally only becomes a problem where an original balance has been disturbed. The inner world, which Freud sees as essentially shaped by the "drive life", corresponds to Piaget's ideas: "For Piaget, the child's cognitive development is promoted by striving for a balance between the requirements for accommodation to the environment on the one hand and the inner ideas of this reality to which it tries to assimilate it on the other" (Hallpike, 1984, p. 25). Of course, this is not the place to deal exhaustively with the parallels and contradictions between Freud's and Piaget's theories. Piaget himself has taken a stand on this (Piaget, 1978). In addition to Furth (1990), see the list in Kohler (2009, p. 87, note 160). 33 Elsewhere it says: "We shall see that the pattern of later stages of preoperational thinking (articulated conception) generally best fits primitive thinking, even if concrete operations develop under favourable circumstances" (Hallpike, 1984, p. 41). 34 Phylogenetically, language is also not the oldest form of human communication; gesture, communication through gestures, precedes it in time (Goodman, 1994, pp. 23-25). Goodman emphasises the role of gestures in rituals (which have recently become the focus of historical research) (p. 26). 43 However, this point could in turn be connected with the help of psychoanalytic theory, according to which the "factual occupations of the objects, the first and actual object occupations", are located in the unconscious, while "the system Vbw arises in that this factual conception becomes overoccupied through the linking with the word conceptions corresponding to it. Such overoccupations, we can assume, are what bring about a higher psychic organisation" (Freud, 1915e, p. 300). Michael Wetzel (1991, p. 391) attests that the described concept of two chains of association is closely related to Saussure's corresponding distinction between signifier and signified. It would be interesting to find out whether the bricolage principle constitutive of "wild thinking", to whose relations to Saussure's theory Lévi-Strauss himself draws attention (Lévi-Strauss, 2018, pp. 29-36; on Saussure: pp. 31), does not rest in a very fundamental way on the series of associations, which Freud understood as a hinge between conscious and unconscious (cf. on "association": Laplanche and Pontalis, 1972, pp. 75-77). Freud's assumption cited above about the primacy of the concept of matter over the concept of words leads to the hypothesis that phylogenetically the development of language has made necessary the higher psycho-spiritual organisation he describes, which defines what is typical for humans. Theoretically, a combined onto- and phylogenetic view of the significance of the development of language for the psychic organisation would also have the potential to mediate between Freud and Piaget on the points described: After all, the priority of the conception of facts over the conception of words, or of the image over language, is something that both thinkers share in their own way. Both also emphasise the importance of action coordination for the development of thinking. A psychological-anthropological perspective that synthesises the findings of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, that focuses not mainly on pathologies but on "norm developments", and that might thus be able to name anthropological universals, could also make a decisive contribution to the exploration of religious ideas. 44 The fact that Freud created new myths with his own myth analysis (as did Lévi-Strauss, cf. Klüners, 2013, p. 216), rather than explaining them conclusively, does not in principle speak against the application of psychoanalytical theories, especially about dream work and fantasy, to fantasies in the collective imaginary of primordial, but also functionally differentiated societies. As already mentioned, Freud also pays attention to psychic normal developments, not least in his metapsychological reflections: "As long as the system Bw dominates affectivity and motility, we call the psychic state of the individual normal" (Freud, 1915e, p. 278). This means above all: if there is no conflict between the conscious and the unconscious that leads to pathological distortions of the relationship between the systems, which especially let the affectivity slip out of the control of the conscious and hand it over to the strivings of the unconscious. At the earliest in such a case, one may assume, the unconscious unfolds its destructive effect and comes into opposition to consciousness. For "in the mature human being" the unconscious merely plays the role of a "preliminary stage of the higher organisation". Moreover, the relationship of the systems is often enough that of "cooperation". And not only the fantasy formations of neurotics, but also those of the "normal" are to be understood as "descendants" of the unconscious, which do not always break through the threshold to consciousness (Freud, 1915e, pp. 288-290). Shouldn't one consider as a "normal state" a balance of the systems that ideally do not interfere with each other? This would then also be in line with Piaget's conviction that thinking is "a selfregulating system" that basically aims to "achieve equilibrium with its environment by constructing stable ideas that overcome the variability and fluctuations of this very environment" (Hallpike, 1984, p. 20). On the "environment" of the system However, "thinking" in reality does not only include the external environment, but also unconsciously psychological things that influence thinking.35 35 Piaget also emphasises "that in practice all thinking is inextricably interwoven with affective associations and motives, which inspire it, but 45 Trance and transcendence In an enlightened society committed to the ideals of rationality, dreams are probably the most conspicuous phenomenon that do not really want to get along with these ideals, with the logos; so it is not surprising that it is dreams that are initially regarded by psychoanalysis as the central access to the world of the non-rational and ultimately also to myth. And even though related mechanisms can be uncovered between myth genesis and the formation of the unconscious, especially in dream work, it must be stated at the same time that dreams themselves probably have a not insignificant, but probably not the decisive share in the emergence of religion. Of course, considerations about the beginnings and initial contents of religion are always necessarily speculative. But in the sense of a certain probability, certain facts add up to an overall picture that at least does not seem implausible. For example, studies conducted in the 1960s showed that 92 per cent of the small ethnic groups examined for this purpose were familiar with the phenomenon of religious trance (Goodman, 1994, p. 48).36 Moreover, all cultures use a term for "religion" that is usually composed of three components, two of which always refer to the experience of religious trance. Trance is therefore fundamental to religion (p. 17).37 Closely related to trance is shamanism, which to a certain extent institutionalises the religious trance in the form of the shaman; he "is a specialist in everything connected with the phenomenon of the soul. He is a mediator between realities, heals illnesses and "the disturbed self-image of the patient". 36 37 and that assimilation itself proceeds through unconscious processes" (Hallpike, 1984, p. 53). Hallpike also calls trance states a worldwide phenomenon (Hallpike, 1984, p. 547). Goodman (1994, p. 17) distinguishes such experiences in principle from dreams, which are structured differently. However, her blanket statement that the elements of dreams, unlike those of trance, are "usually flat" casts some doubt on a proper understanding of dreams and their meaning. 46 and also tries to resolve social conflicts. He (or she) is thus the central instance for the restoration of a threatened psychological and/or social balance (Wernhart, 2004, pp. 137139). The fact that the San, and consequently the Wild Beavers, were already familiar with trance as a means of healing and a journey for the soul indicates a potentially high age (Goodman, 1994, p. 89 f.). Shama- nism can in principle be compared to mysticism (p. 50), the shama- nistic "celestial flight [...] is considered the oldest tangible expression of mystical experience" (Wernhart, 2004, p. 138). The prehistorian Hermann Müller-Karpe and also the theologian Siegfried Vierzig assume that even the Palaeolithic archetypes of religion were a kind of early mysticism (MüllerKarpe, 2005, p. 15 f.; Vierzig, 2009, p. 178). The spiritual "being outside oneself" gave the human being a share in the other reality.38 The origin of the word "spirit", although more recent (which is, however, negligible due to the universal character of religious trance), points to something similar: its original meaning is something like "excitement, emotion". This later gave rise to both "spirit, soul, mind" and "supernatural being, ghost" (Duden, 1989, p. 226). The "spiritual" world and affective excitement and emotion, as experienced most intensively in states of trance or unio mystica, are thus closely related. The most original meaning of religion may therefore have been intro- spection, a becoming within and looking into oneself, not least with the aim of guaranteeing the balance between inside and outside or, in the case of disturbances, to restore it. In the trance and the images that it conveys 38 Vierzig attempts to reconstruct a Stone Age religion on the basis of analogies to s h a m a n i s m : "What connects Stone Age religion with shamanism is, on the one hand, that the state of ecstatic trance is a fundamental part of religiosity, and, on the other hand, the fact that the cosmos not only encompasses the real world, but that it includes an Otherworld in which rebirth occurs, symbolised in the underworld of the cave, but also of the graves. Just as the shaman has the ability to function as a wanderer between the two worlds, Stone Age man also lives in two worlds in his rituals, for he too pursues the goal of a psychic outsiderness that gives him a share in the Otherworld" (Vierzig, 2009, p. 178). 47 And since other laws apply to inner reality than to the outer world, the products of the former seem fundamentally "irrational", at least in the sense of a paradigm of reality derived from the standards of the outer world. The transcendent world is to a large extent the world of the religious trance. 39 What is decisive, however, is the generally valid therapeutic meaning of the religious trance, which has meanwhile been researched with ethnomedical and ethnopsychological approaches and thereby also examined for its parallels to modern psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic methods (Wernhart, 2004, p. 138; Heller, 1990, p. 164).40 Trance states, especially under hypnosis, are generally known from psychotherapeutic work (A. Müller and Stickel, 2010). Before Freud turned to the analysis of dreams, such trance states were one of the pathological phenomena he studied, especially in hysterics, as were hallucinations under hypnosis. Ludwig Janus sees the early psychoanalysis, which still used the instrument of hypnosis, as decisively determined by features of depth regression, whereby depth regression means "the actualisation of states of experience and bodily states of mind from the pre-linguistic period". Freud's later turning away from the hypnosis technique was mainly due to the endeavour to raise the treatment method to a cognitive, linguistic level, and did not bear the character of total rejection (Janus, 1990, p. 69). The trance, on the other hand, can comparatively easily reactivate memories from pre-linguistic times, which presuppose a fundamentally different experience of reality. This is also exploited by current hypnotherapies, which offer the patient 39 40 The fact that their concrete content depends on the respective environment and society and is thus basically a historically variable quantity (cf. Goodman, 1994, p. 55) has already been mentioned in connection with the idea of the Otherworld. Heller reflects the widespread view that shamanism is the most common and oldest form of psychotherapy in the world (Heller, 1990, p. 164). 48 In the course of a progressive trance, the verbal character of thinking diminishes more and more, and at the same time thinking becomes pictorial (p. 22). As the trance progresses, the verbal character of thinking diminishes and thinking becomes more pictorial (p. 22).41 In the state of trance, the psyche's ability to process information on very different levels allows the initiation of learning processes that take place unconsciously "and, independently of conscious self-control, give rise to other patterns of association that are therapeutically effective" (p. 19). According to Müller and Stickel, the more direct access to the unconscious psy- chic justifies comparing the trance with a "probe into the unconscious" (p. 135).42 A central difference between religious and hypnotherapeutic trance is, of course, that the former does not usually target the patient's individual life story (Heller, 1990, p. 176). Nevertheless, the mechanisms show a relationship that points to something deeper. If it is true that the trance is largely responsible for the is the source of transcendent ideas and at the same time the most direct path to the unconscious, then this again confirms the thesis that the unconscious is the source of transcendent ideas. 41 42 Heller assumes "that the averbal communication between the shaman and the sick person activates preverbal experience structures" (Heller, 1990, p. 176). Ludwig Janus relates the "shaman's journey" specifically to birth and prenatal experience and defines it as its "figurative revival and symbolisation". The shaman's drum stands for "the maternal heartbeat", his rattle for "the intestinal sounds" (Janus, 2011, p. 166). The description of trance states under hypnosis there is reminiscent of characteristics of religious trance: "Especially in deep trance, positive and negative hallucinations occur when the eyes are open" (A. Mül- ler u. Stickel, 2010, p. 16). "The patient has the sensation of spinning on his own axis" (p. 17). "Dissociation is a completely normal, not a pathological phenomenon, [...]" (S. 18). "In the trance, this binding of perception and thought to the logical categories of waking consciousness is partially or completely suspended. [...] In trance journeys, the hypnotised person explores fantasy worlds in which the natural laws of the physical world no longer apply and which function according to completely different laws" (p. 20). 49 is. Following Luhmann, one could also formulate: The unobservable-unconscious corresponds to "transcendence" itself. The sense of guilt as the most important problem of cultural development In addition to the theory of the unconscious, whose significance for an understanding of religion we have already discussed, psychoanalysis offers the following further assumptions, which in our opinion are of no less importance for the study not only of religion in a historical perspective, but also of cultural history in general: On the one hand, Freud understands "the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development" and "religion" fundamentally as a "reflection of the dynamic conflicts between ego, id and superego [...] which psychoanalysis studies in the individual, the same processes, repeated on a wider stage" (Freud, 1971, p. 98). 98).43 On the other hand, the fact that the communication between the generations, which takes place largely unconsciously, is a historically effective force is one of the central connectable ideas of Freud's cultural analysis, a thesis that he advocates in Totem and Taboo (Klüners, 2013, p. 217). The dualism of libido and aggression "as the motor of all action" (Mertens, 2000, p. 18), still advocated by psychoanalysis despite the criticism of Freud's drive theory, is the third basic theorem on which a psychoanalytically informed historical study of culture and religion should be based. All three finally converge in Freud's conviction that "the feeling of guilt [...] is the most important problem of cultural development" (Freud, 1930a, p. 493 f.). The belief in a "guilt" of human beings is part of of many religions; probably most pointed is the Christian doctrine of "original sin". In the latter concept, guilt and transgenerational transmission coincide. Guilt derives from the activity word "sollen" (Duden, 1989, p. 652). According to Gün43 This dialectic is the decisive common denominator of Freud's cultural theory and Hegel's philosophy of history (cf. Klüners, 2013, p. 75). 50 According to Dux, the "should" is a special form of structuring human behaviour, which is dependent on rules in the interaction with conspecifics. Important rules are shaped into norms. This "temporalisation of interaction in norms" is fundamental to the human form of existence (Dux, 1989, p. 69). The child learns to structure its behaviour in particular in interaction with an "always already more competent other" who represents the outside world for it (p. 47). This does not contradict the psychoanalytical theory that the child is taught behavioural norms by parents or other adult caregivers, which it internalises as a "superego" in the context of a psychological processing of such interactions. However, there are obviously great differences in the way in which such norms are conveyed and consequently also in how they are internalised. Hallpike emphasises that these differences can be of fundamental cultural significance and even help to explain the specificity of entire cultural forms. Thus, in his view, one of the striking characteristics of primordial societies is that "[t]he education [is] by participation, in the context of real tasks, and not so much by verbal instruction outside the context". (Hall- pike, 1984, p. 162). In contrast, children in modern urban society do not learn primarily through participation in community life, but partly in separate areas such as school, partly through explicit verbal instruction by adults (p. 47 f.). Cultures differ, ergo, through specific types of norm transmission, or, expressed psychoanalytically: through specific forms of superego formation. More explicit transmission of norms leads, one may assume, to more explicit formation of a superego.44 Thus in 44 Ara Norenzayan argued that it was only the growth of human societies that made the "Big Gods" - i.e. omniscient gods with the function of moral "guardians" who intervened in events - necessary, because only in this way could the control of norms, which was still largely unproblematic in faceto-face communities, have been maintained: "Believers who feared these gods cooperated, trusted, and sacrificed for the group much more than believers in morally indifferent gods or 51 Closely related to this is the problem complex of the cultural sense of guilt, which is thematised in religious ideas. Such a theme first became tangible in early agrarian societies at the transition from the stage of hunting and gathering to sedentarisation. According to Klaus E. Müller, the firm repertoire of their myths includes the conviction of a former violation of divine commandments in the sense of a "fall into sin" and a resulting punishment similar to the expulsion from paradise known from the biblical narrative. However, after the expulsion, the heroes of culture, sent to mankind by the Creator to a certain extent as a demonstration of grace, would ultimately have taught them not only the building of the soil and the production of goods for daily use, but also the rules of peaceful social coexistence, so that they were still allowed to live in a "quasi-paradise world" despite their transgressions (K. E. Müller, 2010a, p. 1). E. Müller, 2010a, p. 148).45 When such social rules are explicitly problematised for the first time, this is an indication that they have de facto become a problem, measured at least against a previous state.46 Living together seems to have lost some of its self-evidence. Indeed, the early agrarian planter cultures are no longer the egalitarian societies of the savage period (on these, cf. e.g. Helbling, 1987).47 The subgroups of the respective community are assigned different tasks and rights; the adult men and the elders, for example, are responsible for the control of norms and enjoy the highest status, while the wives, due to the exogamy requirement, are mostly from foreign countries and thus considered less "civilised". 45 46 47 gods lacking omniscience" (Norenzayan, 2013, p. 8). A recent statistical study confirmed this thesis (Whitehouse et al., 2019). Müller has dedicated his major work to these cultures, which he calls the "'standard group' of ethnology" (K. E. Müller, 2010a, p. 146) (K. E. Müller, 2010b). The shift of focus "from animal spirits to the interaction of people with each other" in the g a r d e n e r s ' narratives is also noted by Goodman (Goodman, 1994, p. 74). Savage cultures are central to the understanding of human affairs: in a very basic sense, they form the foil for how it was actually meant to be. 52 ethnic groups and must first be "acculturated". Above all, the birth of sons increases the prestige of wives. Mythical ideas also serve to justify the "inequalities and dependency relationships" between the individual subgroups (K. E. Müller, 2010a, pp. 150-153). The status of women in connection with male control of norms is of particular interest when considering cultural superego formation. The legal historian Uwe Wesel (1980), who dedicated his own monograph to the "Position of Women in Early Societies", assumes that at the same time as the emergence of relative inequality between the sexes as a result of the compulsion to produce children, the social pressure on the family also increased. In addition, not only the relationship between husband and wife, but also that between children and parents had become more solidified in comparison to the savage society, and the "emotional cohesion" of the family members had intensified. Even if one still has to assume that structures are de facto free of domination, they have lost flexibility and openness (Wesel, 1980, pp. 91-94). The changes in the social, above all family structure, and especially the implicit devaluation of women, cannot have remained without repercussions on the psyche of the community members and ultimately also on the specific formation of the superego. As a hypothesis, it should be formulated that the new types of stress could have favoured the development of "depression" - perhaps not in a sense that is common today, but in a special, culturally related form.48 As a result of the central importance of mothers for the socialisation of their offspring, especially in early childhood, this fact would hardly be of any significance. 48 Fiona Bowie refers to Peggy R. Sanday's theory according to which the devaluation of women goes hand in hand with the loss of a sense of security in the wake of environmental conditions that have become problematic. Accordingly, problematic environmental conditions cause a stronger orientation of societies towards an outside world that is now perceived as threatening for the first time. Women and nature are experienced as "potentially dangerous and in need of control" (Bowie, 2008, p. 121, p. 132). As already mentioned, it was primarily the (psycho-)social consequences of changed environmental conditions that led to women being placed in a worse position. 53 weight in terms of the psychosocial development of a community.49 Historically, it does not remain with the intra-societal shifts. Mainly in the course of a population growth that has been observed in various places on the planet since neolithisation, warlike conflicts between ethnic groups have also increased (Harris, 1989, pp. 217-226). At some point, domination emerges. The ethnologist Marvin Harris assumes that male education adapted to the new conditions led to an intensification of the Oedipal problem (p. 356). It would indeed be necessary to show what psycho- logical consequences "social disciplining" - to use a term that actually comes from the study of warlike societies in the early modern period (cf. Oestreich, 1969) - has in archaic cultures; this could be the task of ethnopsychoanalysis, for example. As far as written cultures are concerned, a new kind of treatment of the theme of guilt can be observed in the environment of the Medieval societies of the Late Bronze Age, which generally "attaches the punishment to the guilt, [...] the consequence to the deed" (Assmann, 2018, p. 236). It is ultimately responsible for a different way of dealing with history, which is interpreted as a connection between doing and happening, and has a dynamising effect on cultural memory as well as on the relationship between humans and their gods. History takes on the character of a confession, times of hardship the meaning of a punishment, gods become overseers of human action and "instances of accountability" (p. 297). Jan Assmann goes on to write: "In the sign of guilt, history becomes legible, i.e. it is filled with meaning, semiotised or de-trivialised. [...] In the concatenation of events, it is not some abstract historical causality that manifests itself, but 49 Goodman, for example, states that horticultural cultures have "overwhelming feelings of guilt", which she associates with the "rape of the mother (earth)"; for the first time, these have also provoked the idea of "an end of the world", "through which the desecration of the earth is to be avenged" (Goodman, 1994, p. 31). Here one might suspect a reflection of psycho-logical processes. 54 the punishing will of an enraged deity who sends a new, more terrible sign of its wrath with every event" (p. 243 f.). From Mesopotamia to Rome, guilt becomes the trigger for increased "memory and self-thematisation". The cause is the experience of suffering. The latter stands in contrast to the assumption of a cyclical recurrence. Through the "semiotisation of suffering", "the circularity of time and the contingency of history are broken" (p. 244). The linear understanding of history, including its beginning and end, gains weight in the sign of guilt and suffering. Some of the linguistic images used in the Bible to characterise the wrathful God are drastic: "[...] you have showered us with wrath and persecuted us and strangled us without mercy" (Lamentations of Jeremiah 3:42-43, here quoted after K. E. Müller, 2010a, p. 165). The idea of impending annihilation due to human transgressions, due to guilt, also underlies Christianity in a universalised form: the Last Judgement is imminent in every case; only the Lord knows the time and hour.50 The cultural superego has become cruel; never has the para- dies been further away. Even in the secularised civilisation of modernity, these religious narratives continue to have an effect: "The West thinks apocalyptically", as the medievalist Johannes Fried (2001, p. 9) puts it. In his opinion, the apocalyptic fear of the end of the world has not only acted as a motor for the emergence of modern natural science based on the verifiability of facts,51 but also forms the ferment for very contemporary doomsday scenarios based on "CO2, ozone hole, climate catastrophe, air pollution, oil spill, environmental destruction". 50 The end of the world is the absolute increase of inner-worldly punishment. Salvation can no longer be inner-worldly. According to Müller, this was already true for Jesus of Nazareth himself: "For Jesus of Nazareth it was certain that things had already been decided. The time of the prophets, with John the Baptist as the last, was behind him. The end of the world was imminent. Soon, he proclaimed to his disciples, 'the sun and the moon will lose their light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will move'" (K. E. Müller, 2010a, p. 165). 51 Compare the already described thesis of fear as the motor of modern historical science, which sees itself as a corrective of cultural memory. 55 and the like (Fried, 2016, p. 259). Decades before Fried, Karl Löwith analysed modern historical philosophy, whose doctrines of salvation in the form of ideologies in the 20th century had very tangible, global political consequences, as the heir to eschatological certainties of faith; ideologies are thus based on secularised theology and, just like the development of modern science, on the fear of the Last Things (Löwith, 1953).52 Apocalyptic thinking thus continues to shape a world from which religion has largely abandoned its role as the main symbol and source of meaning.53 Its psychological prerequisites - certain types of cultural superego formation and a related basic cultural sense of guilt - are still awaiting scientific investigation.54 Conclusion It is not easy to summarise in a few words what has been said so far, which the reader will not have been unjustified in thinking was a little verbose. Unfortunately, the prolix character is due to the subject matter itself, so that although the author is relieved in this respect, the clarity of his argumentation may not have gained much. We will therefore try at the end to 52 For a critique, cf. Baumgartner (1996, p. 166 f.), who makes a finer d e f i n i t i o n of the term: Not "eschatology", i.e. the belief in the Last Things, but "ecclesiology" as the belief in the end that has not yet come, has in fact been secularised. 53 This applies first and foremost to the West, but also to the former - or still "socialist" countries and thus to the g r e a t e r part of the planet. The Islamic world, or political Islam, is probably more of an exception in global terms. Even the growing need f o r religiosity outside of institutionalised religion (cf. Wer- hart, 2004, pp. 149-152) does not fundamentally call into question the thesis of the loss of the decisive (but at least official) function of giving meaning. 54 Exceptions includeCremerius (1989), Janus (2011, p. 185). 56 The aim is to bring order into the thicket by formulating a few central sentences and theses: Ȥ The central concept and content of religion is - across cultures the soul. Ȥ Religious ideas about the origin of the soul and a spiritual sphere beyond the physical world implicitly address the same questions that are at the centre of epistemological and scientific considerations today. Ȥ Despite its provisional (perhaps hasty) departure from the scientific worldview, the soul is still the linchpin of human thought about itself. Ȥ (Current panpsychist positions even rehabilitate, on a level that transcends human concerns, the assumption of the existence of a soul or mental that is not reducible to matter). Ȥ Psychoanalysis understands the teleology of desire as the constituent of the soul, which is dialectically intertwined with physical need, overcomes the Cartesian separation of substances and operates again with the category of the "soul". Ȥ The modern sciences - both the observational and the historical sciences, which are dealt with in more detail here - are based on the reality principle, just as the tracking of pristine cultures was. It is not the reality principle itself, but above all the area of its application that constitutes the specifically scientific nature of the scientific reference to the world. Ȥ Reason and faith have the potential to come into conflict with each other, because the reality principle and the pleasure principle have this potential. The more the reality principle or "reason" - penetrates into areas that were reserved for the pleasure principle - or "faith" - the more obvious the conflict between them becomes. Ȥ The pleasure principle dominates the unconscious. The unconscious corresponds to the unobservable of religion, the formations of the unconscious to the (original) formations of the religious. Ȥ According to psychoanalytical understanding, the formations of the unconscious represent wish fulfilments. In a very all57 In the same general sense, the formations of the religious can also be interpreted as fulfilments (or enactments) of desire. Their great significance is, among other things, the consequence of the fact that desire, as the psychological complement of need, is just as ubiquitous as the latter. Ȥ The often seemingly irrational character of the formation of religion results from the fact that its origin is largely to be found in the "child's soul life". According to both psychoanalytic and developmental psychology (cf. Oesterdiekhoff, 2010, p. 224 f.), different layers of experience and thus information systems, both child and adult, shape the human psyche (cf. Janus, 2011, p. 67). In particular, experiences stemming from pre-linguistic (and here especially from prenatal) times superficially have a foreign, irrational character. Ȥ The presumably most original form of religion is the religious trance, whose task is to maintain the psychic and social balance between inside and outside. It achieves its goal by mediating between the psychic layers of experience and information systems, ideally bringing them into harmony with each other. Its main instrument is introspection. Ȥ Religion is thus, according to its origin, a form of soul-searching. It has primarily a psycho- and social-therapeutic or equilibrating function. Ȥ The social changes at the transition to sedentarisation cause psychological and consequently also religious changes, which become tangible in cultural thematisations of social guilt. There is a causal link between new kinds of psychological stress, especially for mothers, and the increasing loss of the former certainty that Mother Earth nurtures, protects and accepts her "children". The relationship between inside and outside, between conscious and unconscious, is constitutive not only for the scientifically legitimised study of the soul, but also, on closer inspection, for its original forms, which we have become accustomed to calling religion(s). 58 has. The parallels between the unconscious and the transcendent point to the underlying relationship: the unconscious is, in a certain sense, the interface between the individual and the transcendent, supra-individual order in which he or she is embedded - regardless of whether the latter is understood as "natural" or "supernatural", physical or metaphysical. Whether there is a Brahman apart from the Atman, however, remains a question of faith. Literature Antweiler, C. (2011). Man and world culture. 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Weinheim: Psychologie-Verlags-Union. 66 Martin Klüners Comment on Jörn Rüsen's contribution "The red threads in the fabric of history" In his text, Jörn Rüsen develops an elaborate theory of the formation of his- toric meaning, which can also be read as the sum of a decades-long examination of this topic. His explanations in this regard are correspondingly complex. Consequently, only individual aspects can be dealt with in this short commentary. Rüsen opens his reflections with a definition of "sense", which emphasises the "dual nature of the human being" articulated in the term and, with regard to human action, its teleological quality. Both assumptions also underlie my own thoughts, inspired by the body-soul dichotomy and the etymology of the concept of meaning. Although Rüsen refrains from an explicit psychological discussion of the body-soul dual nature of the human being, he concedes the psychological dimension of meaning of the historical and, in particular, the unconscious historical power. The ter- minology in the corresponding section seems to me to be somewhat imprecise in certain points (for example, in Rüsen's remarks about "I" and "superego", "libido" in supposed demarcation from "drives" and as an equivalent to Hegel's "cunning of reason" etc.), but in principle, apart from Rüsen's approving reference to C. G. Jung and his theory of archetypes, there are essential similarities between his and my approach. G. Jung and his theory of archetypes, there are essential similarities between his and my approach. This applies above all to Ruesen's criticism in the last paragraph of the methodology of professional historians, which largely ignores the "powers of the unconscious". 123 The focus on the concept of meaning locates Rüsen's (and my) reflections within a tradition whose r e l a t i v e l y young roots in the late 19th century he himself points to (p. 71). At that time, religion had lost its role as the central provider of meaning, and man filled the void as the "guarantor of meaning in his world" (p. 75). Rüsen accordingly - and legitimately - understands the once dominant religious services of creating meaning as a specific form of historical services of creating meaning, consequently as part of a superordinate whole, as it were. It is probably due to this circumstance that Rüsen only devotes the sections "Religion", "Immanence and Transcendence", "The Religious Dimension" and "Transcendence and Immanence - Historical Meaning and Religious Salvation" to the problem of religion. Religion is not exactly at the centre of his argumentation. For my personal taste, it comes a little too short in view of the given topic ("religion and meaning"). In my opinion, it would have been a worthwhile endeavour to take a closer look at the contrast between religious and, in particular, cognitive meaning-creation and to ask about possible reasons for this antagonism.1 On the other hand, we are unanimous in the observation that religion is by no means synonymous with "belief in miracles and dogmas" (p. 76), but rather the belief in a world beyond what is sensibly comprehensible denotes the cross-cultural quality of the religious. In my own contribution, I have attempted to offer a psychological definition of this religious, which is also based on empirical, especially ethnological research. Rüsen's focus is rather on the formulation of universally valid characterisations of religious services of meaning, based on anthropological universals, which reflect the concrete (and admittedly always relative) state of research. 1 The cognitive historicisation of the past is a d d r e s s e d by Rüsen, but without embedding it in a historical context, without placing it more concretely in time (apart from individual remarks about the Age of Enlightenment, etc.). There is also no reference to Jan Assmann's research on cultural memory (Assmann, 2018). 124 of the cultural and social science disciplines involved is largely neglected. In any case, Rüsen makes comparatively little reference to the corresponding secondary literature in his text, with a few exceptions (e.g. K. E. Müller). However, in order to obtain a theory of human meaning formation that claims transcultural, even universal validity - an endeavour I absolutely support - it is necessary, in my opinion, to examine supposed anthropological universals for their actual "universality". Otherwise, the old problem of the ahistoricity of basic anthropological assumptions threatens here as well. In my opinion, the most drastic break in human thinking about space, time and the self paralleled the most fateful change in our mode of existence (and subsistence) in the course of neolithisation - savage cultures therefore tell essentially different stories about themselves and the world than later cultural stages. At the same time, because of little or no "alienation(s)", they are best able to provide information about any anthropological universals beyond historical, culturally conditioned distortions, i.e. to a certain extent about how it was actually "meant" - to take up a formulation from my own contribution. When Rüsen, for example, presumably influenced by the aforementioned ethnologist K. E. Müller, writes that the outside world beyond one's own settlement area appeared "uncanny, threatening, demonic" to people, so that "the familiar and inhabited should be apotropaically protected", this certainly applies to the horticultural societies since Neolithisation (explicitly studied by K. E. Müller), but not to the same extent to hunter-gatherer cultures. The same can be said about the distinction between "good and evil" as the basis of a normativity of action resulting from this, the "cosmological special position" supposedly accorded to humans by "all cultures", the "universal" concept of the "human being", which Rüsen also describes as universal. "excess of intentionality of human consciousness over the real conditions and circumstances of his life", the (presumably rather historically made) inhumanity or also the specific "restlessness of the heart" described by Augustine as part of a basic psychological endowment of man. 125 Undoubtedly, all these aspects can claim decisive importance for certain cultural stages, namely the Neolithic and post-Neolithic societies that dominate the planet - but whether they are really anthropological "universals" in the sense that they have been characteristic of humans from the beginning of their genus or species history, I dare to doubt. In order to name universals of this kind, I think it would be necessary to reflect decisively on the contrast between hardly or not at all self-alienated savage cultures and more strongly self-alienated soil cultivating and cattle breeding cultures. I agree with Rüsen that anthropological universals can decisively help a world society that is perhaps more than ever in need of orientation to form coherent, generalisable images of meaning and thus "avoid moralism, relativism and objectivism as implausible strategies of historical thinking". With regard to (value) relativism (which was also reproached not least of all to Rankean historicism) as well as to exaggerated moralism, psychoanalysis, which for its part makes im- or explicitly generalising anthropological statements, can, in my opinion, make an important contribution to the above-mentioned project: its instruments make it possible in principle to identify pathologies and irrationalities of the historical process (Klüners, 2016, p. 656 f., note 16), Note 16) as well as the moral development addressed by Rüsen2 and in this way holds the potential for a global understanding, not least of normative issues. 2 An example: When Rüsen characterises the Enlightenment as essentially having "replaced religion with morality" (p. 79), this process could be interpreted psychoanalytically in terms of the replacement of one specific superego form by another. 126 Literature Assmann, J. (2018). Cultural Memory. Writing, memory and political identity in early advanced civilizations (8th ed.). Munich: Beck. Klüners, M. (2016). The Unconscious in Individual and Society. On the applicability of psychoanalytic categories in historiography. Psyche Journal of Psychoanalysis and its Applications, 70 (7), 644-673. 127 Letter from Martin Klüners to Jörn Rüsen Dear Mr Rüsen, Thank you for your comment on my essay. I see that, apart from briefly pointing out common ground, you too have concentrated primarily on those passages of my essay where we - for once, one might almost say - do not agree. For the fact that there are in part considerable differences in perspective and method between our positions, but no fundamental disagreement, really needs no further explanation. For a scientific dialogue, however, the mere exchange of pleasantries and affirmations would be rather boring. In the following, I would therefore like to devote myself to those of your characterisations with which I disagree: 1. Both in your essay and in your commentary you mention C. G. Jung and his student Erich Neu- mann approvingly and express your regret that I, for my part, do not quote these authors. G. Jung and his student Erich Neumann and express your regret that I, for my part, do not quote these authors. In fact, I have not yet dealt with Jung exhaustively. However, there are good reasons for this omission: At the latest since the break between Freud and Jung in 1912, Freudians have looked at the former "crown prince" with a certain suspicion, which, apart from personal differences between the father of psychoanalysis and the father of analytical psy- chology, is based above all on differences in content. For even at the time of his friendship with Freud, Jung tended towards obscurantism and mysticism, which sometimes led him to highly questionable epistemological assessments. 131 As far as I know, the archetype theory can also be subsumed under this. It is therefore problematic, in my opinion, to regard Jungian archetypes as anthropological universals that are suitable for interpreting human history, as you suggest with reference to Neumann (an assumption that was also expressed in a similar way by Arnold Toynbee; see Klüners, 2013, p. 116 f., p. 119 f., note 485). Note 485), is in my opinion problematic. Conversely, however, I do not want to exclude the possibility that Jung's theory, which, as I said, I do not know well enough, contains valuable ideas for cultural analysis, which could certainly fertilise future research in an epistemologically reformulated form. 2. They plead for "a critique of Freud's ideas on cultural history of humankind and its conception of religion as an 'illusion'". This critique has been around for a long time - in my dissertation (Klüners, 2013) I took a comprehensive s t a n d on it. For my argumentation in this volume, it is not so much Freud who theorises culture, but rather Freud who analyses the human psyche and in particular the unconscious that is important. 3. At the same time, this admits that I adopt many basic psychoanalytical assumptions. However, the statement that I limit myself almost entirely to Freud and pay little attention to other psychological positions is not correct: I deal with Jean Piaget's developmental psychology in some detail. Since the later 20th century, this has been of such eminent importance for the discourse of cultural studies that there is no getting around it. In my opinion, a theory of history oriented towards anthropological universals should also take Piaget into account as far as possible. 4. I have felt thoroughly misunderstood in the last two years. The following paragraphs of your commentary deal with the discipline from which both of us come, historical science, as well as historical knowledge: "Klüners considers the established understanding of science in historical science to be outdated, even completely inapplicable" is an assessment, the basis of which I frankly do not understand. In my 132 In any case, there is no mention of this in the text. On the contrary, in the section "The Interest in Historical Truth" I take up the cudgels for modern historical scholarship and especially for the source-critical method. I speak explicitly of the "unprecedented condensation of information" of written sources and, with regard to the historical-critical method, of the "incomparably precise analysis and interpretation of what is communicated in the source". Using a concrete example, namely the study of the medieval feudal system, I also point out, "that only a close look at the sources is capable of overturning historical 'certainties'". These are quite clear statements for the understanding of science in historical scholarship. 5. In the section "Limits of the science of history as a science of consciousness", I merely criticise, in accordance with the title, a narrowing of certain aspects, n a m e l y the excessive fixation on performances of consciousness, which in my opinion can actually be traced back historically to the textual focus (I do mention that there are other historical methods in the meantime). There is no disagreement at all between our positions - I am basically just saying in other words what you yourself criticise in your own contribution: "What this temporally oriented part of the human mentality - its 'spirit', so to speak - means for historical thinking has still been little researched. (This may be due to the fact that the subjectivity of professional historians in dealing with historical experience is fixed on clear methodological rules and, with this fixation, is little suited to reflecting on its conditionality by powers of the unconscious)" (p. 96). So we agree: the unconscious is not a category to be taken seriously in current (German) historiography. Conversely, I freely admit that I have polemically sharpened some formulations ("consciousness fetishism", etc.) - but this was not meant as a discrediting of the entire discipline. As I said, from a (depth-)psychological perspective (which I do not have), it is a question of 133 According to the concept of this book series, the only purpose is to criticise the neglect of certain aspects. 6. The equation of tracking and modern source criticism is not found in my text. I was also not interested in a judgemental comparison of the two "methods", but rather in attributing to the trackers an understanding of reality that comes very close to our scientific understanding, at least in certain areas of their relation to the world. They must proceed "scientifically" where it serves to secure their subsistence. From a historical point of view, the decisive question is why this limitation does not remain, but why the (proto-) scientific understanding of reality is at some point applied to the level that Jan Assmann calls "cultural memory". Why do pristine cultures get by for millennia with myths that are rather remote from science, but why does the importance of factual history grow rapidly at some point (and especially in the Occident after the departure of religion as the supreme source of meaning)? These were the guiding questions of my reflection. 7. In my opinion, the verdict "Klüners completely ignores the practical orientation function of historical knowledge etc." also needs to be qualified. Whether "practical" or not, the orientation function of historical knowledge is in fact the actual pivot of my essay - what in earlier times, as I said, was myth, the "Dreamtime" or even the Christian history of salvation and the like, in our society today is historical "reality" backed up by quel- len criticism. That is why I chose historical science as the mother of all historical sciences and the symbol of a general paradigm shift. As the representative of "reason" and the antipode of "religion", I could certainly have chosen the natural sciences, to which this function is classically attributed - but in my eyes, they are not a sense-building service in the narrower sense and therefore not a real substitute for religion. It is rather the case that the new, more cri- tical relationship to the cultural tradition is all- 134 if it has developed under the influence of the scientific method. What is decisive, however, is that the "turning away from God" since the Enlightenment corresponds to a "turning towards time" and the entire human understanding of self and the world is historicised. This applies not only to the great historicalphilosophical drafts or the new methodology in the study of ancient chronicles and documents, but also, for example, to the geological study of the history of the earth or the biological study of the origin of species (Gamm, 2001, pp. 9-11; Klüners, 2013, p. 165). This histo- risation is the actual surrogate of religious symbolism. To put it succinctly: From the 19th century onwards, "history" (of the earth, of nature, but above all of man) replaced "God" (or the religious and mythological services of symbolism). These are my thoughts on your criticism. As I said, these should not obscure the fact that we are not opponents on core issues. For the time being, best regards from your Martin Klüners Literature Gamm, G. (2001). Introduction: Time of Transition. On the Social Philosophy of the Modern World. In: Gamm, G., A. Hetzel, M. Lilienthal. Interpretations. Major works of social philosophy (pp. 7-27). Stuttgart: Reclam. Klüners, M. (2013). Philosophy of History and Psychoanalysis. With a preface by J. Straub. Göttingen: V&R unipress. 135